Brexit has sucked all the energy that should have been focused on a global pandemic

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One clear reason for the absence of a proper early response to the coronavirus pandemic has to be that, after the election and along with the prime minister’s absence on holiday, government energy was almost totally focused on the Brexit issue, with a tight timescale for some sort of progress on our “future” outside the EU, for which they believed they had been given a mandate.

Pandemic, what pandemic? The government has clearly not been able to cope with reality when it arrived.

Wendy Draper
Winchester

Given Covid-19, it is utter madness driven by misplaced ideology that sees the UK government pushing blindly towards ending the Brexit transition period at the end of this year.

The impact on the Scottish economy of Covid-19 will be devastating, and combined with the growing likelihood of a no deal, or at best a hard Brexit deal, this course of action seems utterly nonsensical and highly irresponsible.

Under the terms of the withdrawal agreement the transition period may be extended by mutual agreement by up to two years, if the UK requests an extension before 30 June this year.

All attention should be focused on dealing with the pandemic and an extension sought, avoiding damage to jobs, wellbeing and the economy.

Alex Orr
Edinburgh

Brexit energy

Is it any coincidence that the incompetence and lack of preparedness on the part of this government, now being revealed in the harsh light of Covid-19, comes at a time when those in charge are not the most able but rather those who have gained office through most enthusiastically espousing the Brexit dogma?

The Brexit project was characterised by wild unsubstantiated assertions about “taking back control” and “£350m per week for the NHS” and “Get Brexit done” etc, in much the same way we have been told the NHS would have everything it needed, that there would be 100,000 tests a day. Those statements have rapidly been shown to be as hollow as the NHS now is after being mismanaged and cut by successive Conservative governments.

Three times over the last couple of months this government missed the chance of being part of an EU scheme to bulk procure masks, gowns and gloves. (Instead hanging much on one shipment from Turkey, now delayed, which will in any event last only two days.) That blinkered, narrow, anti-EU dogma of the Johnson government will now cost lives.

Yet we are still charging towards a Brexit cliff edge. Welcome to a taster of Brexit UK.

Arthur Streatfield​
Bath

Dietary concerns

As the Coronavirus continues to spread at an alarming rate and total deaths escalate, plunging the world into global recession, one thing is for sure. When we successfully find a vaccine we will wake up to a totally different world from the one we knew prior to the Covid-19 outbreak.

While we live in fear, Wuhan’s wet market in China was allowed to reopen in March. This is where the source of Covid-19 is thought to originate from, by selling live animals like pangolins for meat in the most illegal trade of critically endangered wild animals in the world.

The over-populated market also sells bats, rats, cats, dogs and other animals kept in overcrowded and filthy conditions to be slaughtered on dirty stone floors in busy narrow corridors, allowing viruses to jump across species. Weren’t any lessons learnt from Sars, the first pandemic of the 21st century, when the virus jumped from small mammals, sold at wet markets, to humans?

When is illegal and irresponsible meat farming, which caused the pandemic to shut world economies at the cost of human life, going to be stopped?

Governments are going to have to be forced to take notice, as the dead continue to be buried, health systems are overstretched, and so many people lose their incomes. Would such a global disaster on this unprecedented scale arise from cultivating plant food?

Jeannette Schael
Tadley, Hampshire

Is Johnson ‘fit to work’?

In the years since the introduction of universal credit, we have read harrowing accounts of the sick and disabled being subject to invasive and humiliating assessments before being refused this form of state funding, and told they are fit to work.

One wonders, therefore, when we can rigorously assess one Boris Johnson, who is, let us face it, in receipt of significant state funding, to check whether he is also fit for work. Given also that he chose not to attend some five meetings of Cobra at a time of impending national crisis, which is undoubtedly a fundamental part of his job description, will his salary be docked for this dereliction of duty?

Had he been a member of the “non-entitled” classes, all of these sanctions would have been applied.

Kate Hall
Leeds

MIA

The opposition and the media accuse the prime minister of having been “missing in action”.

I have always taken the phrase to refer to a soldier whose fate in battle is as yet unknown, not one who was missing from the battle altogether.

Jen Parry
Didcot​, Oxfordshire